I am an advisor in the following companies - receiving equity-based compensation in return: mobile.dev, TravelPerk & DX. These are companies where I either go back with key people at the company and/or I am excited about their approach.
As of June 2022, I am no longer taking on investment or advising opportunities**. This is for the same reason I do not hold individual stocks: I want to remain unbiased in my analysis and recommendations. I always disclose when I mention a company that I have invested in or where I am an advisor.
** save for very rare exceptions, listed at the bottom of this page.
Investments
My main investment interest areas were developer tooling, engineering productivity, platforms, and software engineering education.
My investment philosophy was simple: I invested in companies I'd jump at the opportunity to work at, if I was not busy with my own business. This also means I recommend all the below companies as great - and promising - places to work at.
They all issue fair equity on top of a good salary. Thanks to equity, if the company does well, so do employees. They have a bold vision, a great team, and are tackling interesting problems.
I am not looking for any further investments since June 2022.
Developer tooling and LLMs 💻📱
Wordsmith: AI agents that give in-house legal teams a suite of AI tools. These tools remove productivity bottlenecks and improve how the legal team works with the rest of the business.
mobile.dev: setting the new standard for mobile development. I'm an active advisor and mobile.dev has been my single biggest investment. I strongly believe they will be in the front of center of innovating on modern mobile development - and become first mobile tooling unicorn. See jobs.
Graphite: code reviews, reimagined. Write and review smaller pull requests, stay unblocked, and ship faster. See open positions.
incident.io: the way incident management should be. Founding members build one of the best incident management systems across the industry at Monzo. Now they're building an even better one for anyone to use. One of the most forward-thinking and inclusive teams I know of. See open jobs.
Stashpad: the developer notepad. A way to manage your working memory (RAM) as you do your daily work. I love this startup as they're starting with the best scratchpad any engineer can ask for, and then make it super easy to extend, share and customize it.
Engineering productivity & education 📈 👨🎓
DX: maximizing engineering efficiency, in a way that works.
Progression: building the next generation of career design tools. There's a huge need for what they do, and I love the energy the team has. From the creators of Progression.fyi.
Invact Metaversity. The future of online education, cofounded by Tanay Pratap, one of the best and committed teachers I know. I love how bold Invact is in rethinking how to make education more engaged.
Payments 💰
Fonoa: automating taxes for the Internet economy. I observed the amount of work implementing taxes meant first-hand, at Uber. Fonoa takes the complex work Uber - and many other large companies - do in-house, and makes it available to any business. I know the founders, who are ex-Uber folks and sometimes get involved with them. Open roles.
Other investments
📅 Rise Calendar: on a mission to help teams get more important work done. They have a world-class founding team, and I worked on the same team as their cofounder/CTO, Willem. Strong recommend. See open jobs.
❌ Block Party. Use social media without harassment. Block Party is building the tools that allow people often harrassed and trolled to have an online experience without any of this.
🏥 PillSorted: medications delivered to your home in the UK. Building a strong engineering team - their CTO is someone I worked with for years at Skype.
📚 Craft Docs: Probably the best writing experience for digital devices, founded by my brother. Apple awarded it the Mac App of the Year award in 2021. It is the only "investment" where I have no financial stake - I don't mix family and business. See open jobs.
Other investments: I've made another few smaller investments via the Uber Alumni Investment Club in 2021-2022. I'm not listing these out individually, as I am not involved with those companies, beyond investing via the syndicate.
Investments since 2023
Wordsmith (2024:) making legal teams AI-native. I've worked with one of the cofounders (Ross) for years at Skyscanner.
"How can I get into angel investing?"
I get this question a lot more from software engineers. I don't have definite answers, but here's how I got into angel investing.
Be aware that when investing, you are likely to have your investment tied up for 10+ years. Also, you can lose everything you invest – this has happened to me several times already! Invest only money that you can afford to lose 100% of.